Development Diaries

Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th development diary. I’m Johan, and I got dragged into this devdiary writing thingie today because of a curse.. We have lost a few members of the team to the dreaded “holiday”-curse, including podcat & doomdark, but we hope to have them back in a wee while. In the last few months, we’ve spent quite a lot of time going through features, and redesigning those that did not improve the game significantly enough from the previous iterations of the series.

One of those features that went the way of the dodo was the goals system. The goals system did not have a visible progression, it did not have clear instructions to the player, and was constantly mixing between things happening because you selected a goal, or things you had to do to fulfill the goal. This was not acceptable for a feature in a modern PDS game, so we soaked our brains in the nectar of the gods for a while, and came up with a new system, which according to our QA team, “Is very very fun”, and also creates replayability.

Now its time for us, without further ado, to introduce the National Focus system.
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With the release of Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado only days away, lead designer Martin Anward has moved to the front of the camera to describe the many changes coming in the latest expansion to Paradox Development Studio’s hit historical empire-building game.
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Hi everyone, time for a smoking fresh diary! This time I am going to go through some of the things we showed in the PdxCon stream in more detail.

One of our important design goals for HOI4 is to make you feel like you are growing and nurturing your army as well as putting more focus into pre-war production. We have showed how its important to build up stockpiles of equipment for your army prior to war and get efficiency up for your production lines and we have talked about how you need to gain and spend experience to modify your divisional templates for the army. So whats left? The soft part of the division - the guys who actually does the fighting in the divisions! We wanted you to be able to affect them more as well, and have the effects be more visible.

Conscription and manpower

Manpower will see some big changes in HOI4. Rather than controlling only how much it ticks up per month your conscription laws now control what percentage of the population you can recruit from the full population count. Conscription laws also come with trade-offs in that recruiting more will impact efficiency of your industry and as you dig deeper and starts scraping the barrel of recruits their quality will drop requiring more training time to reach the same level of proficiency. The idea is to make it less clear cut than in hoi3 where more men was always best at all times.
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Welcome to the fifth and last development diary for Europa Universalis 4: El Dorado. Today we’ll be talking about the gold and silver mines of the new world and how to best secure that wealth for your colonial empire.

Treasure Fleets
It’s no secret that the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Central and South America was primarily driven by a desire for gold and silver. The Spanish crown had sole rights to mine these precious metals in their colonies, which were then loaded onto well-guarded ships and sent back to Spain. Unsurprisingly, this floating wealth drew the attention of pirates and privateers, leading to the Golden Age of Piracy and the Pirates of the Caribbean that we all know and love.

In the El Dorado expansion, we represent this through a mechanic we call ‘Treasure Fleets’. For those that have the expansion, Colonial Nations with gold provinces will no longer gain the income of that gold for themselves, but instead will store it in a ‘Treasure Fleet Counter’ that counts up towards a certain sum depending on the size of the colony’s gold mines. Once the counter is full (usually about twice a year), the colony will send a Treasure Fleet. The Treasure Fleet travels downstream along the trade routes, passing each node between the Colonial Nation and its mother nation’s trade capital. If there are privateers present in these nodes, they will steal a share of the gold relative to their power in the node - so if privateers hold 50% of the power in the Caribbean, they will take half the value out of any treasure fleet that passes through there. At the end of the journey, any money that remains is given to the mother nation, who suffer some inflation depending on the amount of money relative to the size of their economy.
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Welcome to the third development diary for Europa Universalis 4: El Dorado. Today’s topic is the mythical city of El Dorado itself, or rather the system of land exploration that may just result in your conquistadors finding one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. We’ll also be discussing a few other things such as the addition of merchants from Colonial Nations in the expansion and the addition of a large number of DHEs (Dynamic Historical Events) in the free patch.

Hunt for the Seven Cities
In the first Development Diary for El Dorado we talked about Naval Exploration and how you could send your ships on missions to explore certain sea zones or explore a particular coastline. El Dorado has a similar system for land exploration that we call ‘Hunt for the Seven Cities’.
As the name indicates, this system is only available in the New World, and using it is as simple as sending an army led by a conquistador to the Americas and hitting the ‘Hunt for the Seven Cities’ toggle in the unit view. While this toggle is on, the conquistador will automatically explore his surroundings, uncovering terra incognita, fighting natives, and stopping to rest as needed.
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In this 3MA podcast episode, Soren interviews Henrik (Doomdark) Fåhraeus, who is a Game Director at Paradox Development Studio, creator of Crusader Kings and has worked on game series such as Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Also sitting in on the interview is Jon Shafer, lead designer of Civilization 5 and currently at work on his independent strategy game At the Gates. They discuss whether the Civilization and Europa Universalis games live in alternate dimension, whether provinces are better than hexes, and why it's bad to have too many sons.

Welcome to the third development diary for Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado. Today, we’ll be talking about America and Liberty… and no, it’s not about the USA. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the Mesoamerican and South American Inti and Maya religions added in the expansion, and the new Liberty Desire system included in the free patch.

Maya
The Maya were divided into a large number of city-states vying for supremacy. In the past, these states were united in a large confederation called the League of Mayapan until infighting shattered the league. In El Dorado, we’ve attempted to simulate this expansion and contraction through Religious Reforms similar to the ones available to the Nahuatl (for details, see El Dorado Dev Diary 1). For a Mayan nation to pass a reform, they will need to own at least 20 provinces, have positive stability, no revolts, and no overextension. This is a little daunting.

Upon passing a reform, a Maya state will lose about half its territory, shrinking to a size of 10 core provinces determined by culture, religion and distance to capital. Other provinces will break away, joining existing nations or forming new nations and requiring you to reconquer them again. For each reform you have passed, you will be able to keep hold of more territory, retaining an extra province in addition to the original 10. As with the Nahuatl, when the last reform is passed and you border a Western nation, you will be able to reform your religion, getting a tech boost and gaining the permanent benefit of the religious reforms.

Welcome to the second development diary for Europa Universalis 4: El Dorado. Today we’ll only be talking about a single feature, but it’s probably the single biggest feature we’ve added to EU4 since launch: The Nation Designer.

As the name implies, the Nation Designer allows players with the El Dorado expansion to create their own, custom-designed nation to play instead of picking one of the historical nations. The Nation Designer is available for both Single-Player and Multi-Player, and can be used at any start date as long as you are starting a new game.

To make a custom nation, you simply click the new ‘Custom Nation’ button during country selection. This will prompt you to pick a capital province for your custom nation: Choose carefully, as the capital province cannot be changed without cancelling your custom nation entirely! You can start anywhere on the map that isn’t water or wasteland.
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